From product to profits: Google flags enterprise sales as key challenge for Indian AI startups

Google launched the market access program for AI startups on January 15

• Google says Indian AI startups struggle to convert tech into enterprise revenue
• Google launches Market Access Program to help AI startups scale global sales
• New Gemma models launched to support startups in medical imaging and function calling

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Indian AI startups’ biggest challenge is not building products but converting strong technology into enterprise revenue, Seema Rao, managing director for top partners India & corporate development at Google, said.

To help bridge the gap, Google on January 15 launched Market Access Program targeted at AI startups that have achieved product-market fit but are struggling to scale sales.

In an interview to Moneycontrol a day earlier, Rao said Indian startups have access to world-class AI tools, talent and infrastructure and product development is no longer the primary bottleneck. The real gap lies in securing large enterprise customers, particularly outside India.

"There is a full gap between 'I have a great product' and actually selling it to global enterprises," Rao said, while terming it as a "commercial chasm" that determines whether startups can scale and raise follow-on funding rounds.

The market access programme will focus on building enabling startups with enterprise sales capabilities, boosting trust, security and reliability for global market and providing startups access to CXO-level networks, she said.

“This is not just an advisory programme. We think of it as taking startups on a journey to get them a seat at the table, have a conversation, make a pitch and potentially get to contract," she said.

Getting market-ready

Rao said Indian startups building for India are often "global ready" from a product standpoint, given the complexity and diversity of the domestic market. They still need help translating their pitch, sales motion and go-to-market strategy for buyers in markets such as the US and Europe, where decision-making priorities differ.

“Your product might work globally the way it works in India but access is hard. How do you get into those conversations? How do you open those networks?" Rao said.

"There is a translation engine that sits in between, because the language an Indian buyer understands is very different from what a US or Israeli buyer looks for, especially around scale, reliability and security. Everything might be working perfectly fine but access to those global enterprise conversations is still hard," she said.

The programme, expected to onboard 20–30 startups in its first cohort, will also include global market immersion to help founders engage directly with international enterprise customers.

Google also announced new additions to its Gemma open model family — MedGemma 1.5 and FunctionGemma.

With MedGemma 1.5, Google claims to enable startups to work with high-dimensional medical imaging at scale. FunctionGemma is a lightweight model optimised for function calling, on-device, agent-based systems and so on.

Speaking at the launch of these initiatives in New Delhi on Thursday, Preeti Lobana, Country Manager for India, Google, said Indian startups are building serious deep technology and solving population-scale problems with AI. Google’s focus is to support them across the full stack, from skills and infrastructure to trust and market access.

“While the path from labs to prototypes has become quite robust over the last several years, the scaling journey continues to be where a lot of startups struggle - The Google Market Access Program is designed to address this challenge faced by founders,” she said.